Are Your Muscles Tight or Are They Weak?
Do you stretch daily but the feeling of muscle tightness keeps coming back?
You typically feel better after stretching or a massage session because your nervous system relaxes and you feel less pain or tightness causing you to perceive less tightness and discomfort. This effect is usually temporary as nothing has truly changed your muscle tissue, which is why the tightness often returns the next day.
Have a muscle that just won’t loosen up no matter how often you stretch it or dig a massage tool into it? After all, the way to loosen a tight muscle is to stretch it, right? Wellllll……not necessarily. Not all muscles that are tight need to be–or even should be–stretched. It all depends on why it’s tight in the first place. Contrary to popular thinking, inflexibility isn’t always due to lack of stretching. A lot of times, chronically tight muscles are tight because they're weak. Let’s use hamstrings as an example - people stretch their hamstrings all the time and they never get any more flexible. This is an indication that their hamstrings might be weak and that's what's causing the tightness. Mind blowing, isn’t it? Only when the hamstring is actually strong enough will it be able to “let go” and loosen up. When it’s weak, it never gets a chance to actually relax because it’s working soooooooo very hard to keep you upright.
It is a common misconception in the fitness industry that a tight muscle is a strong muscle; in reality, it may be just the opposite. We have been conditioned to think of the tightness itself as the problem, thus the automatic tendency is to try to stretch. But in reality, sometimes tightness is a result of the problem. In those situations, stretching is not the answer–at best it gets you nowhere, and at worst, it aggravates the problem. So the key to correcting the issue is figuring out why a muscle is tight.
Of course there are a few other reasons why a muscle might feel tight, but often overlooked is that it actually may be weak. Pilates is essentially resistance training that creates muscle adaptations. As you get stronger, resistance training may help decrease how stiff your muscles feel, and in the long term it may help prevent the stiffness all together.